We begin with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (who had just been expelled from the

Soviet Union) and Ezra Pound (who two years earlier had been granted, and then denied, the Emerson-Thoreau Award by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences), and go on from there in the company of one of America's leading men of letters. One sample: HK: "It seems not to be remembered Paradise Lost was written by a man who might well have been under a death sentence if Andrew Marvell had not intervened and asked him to just be quiet, partly because he was blind. And Paradise Lost is very largely a political tract in which Satan coming back to disrupt the harmony of the new creation is marvelously plausible and attractive because he is modeled on Charles II, who had just done the same thing and whose point of entrance to the British psyche was notoriously by way of woman."